The Premier League completed a new four year deal starting with the 2025/2026 season (link). The results were underwhelming, as we calculate a total value down 1% from the three-year extension signed during COVID, though the AAV of the “live rights” portion is said to be +4% (still likely flat or down first year of…
Last Friday afternoon, Paramount’s Board of Directors adopted lucrative golden parachutes for senior executives (link). The question is why now? Investors believe it is a sign that Paramount is for sale, as evidenced by PARA stock price surging 5% yesterday (albeit, the stock is still down 25% over the past year and nearly 60% over…
Roblox will hold its third annual investor day tomorrow. There is no mystery to this year’s theme: Roblox will set out to prove that it can be a great business. This is a sea change for the company. Since we first met Roblox several years ago, we have observed CEO Dave Baszucki to make decisions…
Heading into Disney fiscal Q4 (Sept) 2023 earnings on Wednesday after the close, we thought it would be useful to lay out the key strategic questions investors should want answered: 1) Why Ever Take ESPN Flagship Direct-to-Consumer? If Disney were not attempting to transform ESPN flagship into a DTC business, would you take a meaningfully…
Yesterday, Disney announced (8-K link) that Comcast had formally put its 1/3 stake in Hulu to Disney, in accordance with their joint ownership agreement. Disney will initially pay Comcast $8.61 billion (1/3 of the $27.5 billion agreed upon floor valuation, less $561 million of unpaid Comcast capital calls). Depending on where fair market value ends…
Legacy media was late to streaming and tried to rapidly attain global scale through massive spending on content and marketing. Wall Street gave them the leeway for a short period of time. However, subscriber growth slowed, losses ballooned and the capital markets environment shifted dramatically. Today, investors are focused on whether these less ambitious legacy…
Hulu’s original CEO and the former WarnerMedia CEO, Jason Kilar wrote a column earlier today in Variety titled Hollywood Needs to Create Its Biggest Hit Ever. Here’s How the Industry Can Make That Happen. It’s worth remembering/re-reading Kilar’s now-infamous “bad boy” memo from 2011 on the future of TV (link) that was incredibly prescient, despite…
Here are our ten key questions for Netflix management on Wednesday’s Q3 2023 earnings interview (our Q2 2023 questions can be found here). 1) Are You Shifting Animation to a Licensing Model? You have talked about the long-term importance of building franchises in animation that can compete with the industry leaders Universal Studios and Disney. Curious…
Welcome to the Ninth Edition of the LightShed Earnings Scorecard – our stats on the quality of earnings calls. We also continue to monitor mentioned concerns about a recession and inflation, interest in AI and yes, even the Metaverse. This quarter we tracked the earnings calls of 72 companies, adding Sphere Entertainment. Overall, we listened…
HBO has been a premium service since its national launch in the mid-1970’s, a distinction from the broadcast or cable networks that still comprise the basic multichannel video bundle. In essence, limited distribution was a feature, not a bug, with HBO programming appealing to a subset of the US population. As HBO has evolved into…
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